I am currently recovering from a burnout. Concentration, the lack thereof, is what bothers me most. It’s hard to accept that there are very hard constraints in place about the things I can do and the things I can’t.

It feels as if I’m still a long way from being able to have real focus for a few hours in a row, but it gets better. Very slowly.

I removed myself from the social media circus, got rid of all the news alerts and news apps and that indeed makes a difference. I am currently considering removing all portables from my life. Smart phone, tablet.. or at least deleting everything but the eBook Reader App.

It’s still hard from me to even focus on reading a long text „casually“ (skipping lines without noticing and things like that).

It feels like I switched from a sixteen track recording machine to a crappy dictation device in terms of my attention span and parallel processing abilities.

I (my ego) want to do more but my brain simply doesn’t play ball. It’s frustrating and humbling, constantly overestimating my own abilities.

A week goes by so quickly, it looks blurry and there is no feeling of achievement. Simple tasks (sending a letter to some insurance) take days and weeks. And I can only focus on one thing, while everything else immediately fades away and remains forgotten. Task switching turned from something I did 20 times a day to a sheer impossible thing. The transition is incredibly hard. I even forget about the piece of paper where I wrote down some things or my todo list. Heck, I forget that I have one in the first place.

I noticed I can spend three or more hours reading stuff on Reddit without even noticing how time goes by. Even though there would be a hundred better ways to spend time. All those distractions are like heroine for my brain. There’s only one channel available and having this channel filled with a stream of information blocks everything else out. Ironically, even this lone stream is abruptly interrupted with one single notification of an email on the top of my iPad. Toxic.

TL;DR, change things while you still can, because recovering from the Big Bang that happens when you’re completely depleted takes a long time and isn’t pleasant at all. It feels like starting from scratch all over again, tormenting your ego in the process. Not worth it.